by Ashlee Sinn
Derrick worked on repairing the front door the best he could while Julia poured me a glass of water. I waited until she was sitting down next to me before I could get the right words in my mouth. Jesus, those men had really hit me hard. The thought of them, and Danika’s father, caused a vicious wave of anger to shoot through me. My chest rumbled with a low and deadly growl, causing Derrick to immediately rush over and yank his mate off the couch.
“Easy buddy,” he said.
Julia pushed away from him and knelt down next to my legs. “Zane, please. We need to know what happened.”
“He took her,” I roared. Jumping to my feet, I tried to ignore the spinning room, but almost fell on top of Julia. Derrick’s grizzly started to fill the space, heavy with the dominance he’d always had inside of him. I knew I should get my own rage under control, but I couldn’t.
I paced back and forth in the cramped living room, trying to deal with the raw surge of emotions coursing underneath my skin. At one point, I looked at the shattered picture on the wall behind Derrick’s head. And the fact that it had been broken and the fact that those men had invaded my home, pissed me off to no end. I stomped toward the wall, lifted my arm, and punched a hole right through the remaining glass and drywall.
“Zane!” Julia shouted at me. “No, Derrick! Don’t!”
I sensed my friend, and the second in the clan, closing in on me from behind. Turning quickly, I lifted my other hand and punched him across the jaw when he tried to grab me. Roaring out into the air, I landed another punch to his gut, and a third against his cheek, before Julia even had time to scream.
“Zane! Stop being an asshole!” she cried out. And then she jumped forward to stop her mate that was gearing up to lay one on me.
I stood there, waiting for him to hit my face. Wanting to feel the pain because I’d lost her. Danika was gone and it was my fault. Somehow, it was my fault.
Derrick’s fist crushed my nose and I stumbled backward, covering it to stop the blood. Derrick shook his hand like it had hurt him, and worked his jaw back and forth. “Fuck, Zane. What’s wrong with you?”
I looked up at both of them, letting the blood trickle down my chin. I smelled the copper and I used it to help ground me and focus. But my bear was angry. And even though he’d been abused and manipulated in the lab, this was the first time I felt him with me since Danika had rescued us.
“What the fuck is that?” Julia asked.
I whipped my head to the left only to see her standing there with a look of horror on face. She was staring at my left arm as her eyes filled with tears.
“Jesus Christ,” Derrick muttered, moving next to her. “Zane?”
The growl intensified when I lifted my arm to see what I already knew was there. One part of my grizzly had finally decided to join me. But only that one part. My left arm had fully transformed into a reddish-brown mess of hair, fingers now six-inch claws ready for battle. But the fur became more matted and clumped the closer it came to my shoulder, and the odd, bulging muscles pulsed in an unnatural way. I started in awe for a moment before the pain settled in. Like being shot a thousand times, my arm burned and twisted and ripped with the agony of a partial change.
Just like in the lab, I still had no control over my bear. So, when I caught the scent of a wolf, I felt my right leg snap and crunch as it started to change.
“What the fuck?” Seth stood in the doorway and watched in terror as my body cracked and spouted hair only in a few places.
“Stay back, Seth,” Derrick warned. He’d started moving toward the door, pushing Julia behind him as they backed away slowly.
I screamed into the air, the pain frustrating me and wanting my full grizzly so badly, I could barely stand to see the sight of my friends standing in front of me.
Seth pushed his dark hair out of his face and stepped closer.
I held up my human arm. “Stop!”
“Zane, what’s going on with you?” He continued to slink closer. Damn wolf.
“He said Danika’s gone,” Julia whispered.
“She left him?”
Somehow, even in my fucked-up state of mind, I heard the surprise in Seth’s voice. He had visited a few times while Danika was here taking care of me. And every time he stopped by, he’d tease me about claiming her as my mate and make it official before she ran away. He’d seen how good we were together, so he knew.
“No,” I growled. “They took her!” My other arm started to crack, the muscles bulging into their grizzly size and back down again. Screaming in pain, I watched in horror yet again as my hand shifted into a deformed clawed bear paw.
“Holy, fuck,” Seth whimpered.
“Zane,” Julia said quietly, “You have to relax. It’s the only way you can stop this.”
“No!” The sound coming out of my mouth was nothing like my grizzly. “We have to go after her! Now!” I stumbled forward, the human leg unable to hold all of my weight. Seth jumped toward me and reached for my arms, but I turned on him and let the newly clawed left hand sliced across his face.
“Zane!” Julia screamed, only this time I felt her bear rush to the surface. She was still human, but she was challenging me.
Setting my sights on her, I saw red when I looked at her and Derrick. How dare they be so happy with each other while my Danika, my beautiful Danika was being tortured by her father and his freaks? Seth made an odd noise while he flushed his face with water in the kitchen sink, and I stalked closer and closer toward Julia and Derrick.
“Zane, you need to snap the fuck out of it,” Derrick warned.
I felt my lip curl up into a feral smirk. My bear, or the part of my bear that had pushed forward, he wanted blood. Someone would pay for his anger. I let the growl roll off my chest.
“Zane…,” Derrick said again. “Zane!”
My bear didn’t care for his dominance or for the way he was protecting his mate when I couldn’t protect mine. I pounced, pushing off both feet and reaching through the air toward Derrick’s throat. But I never made contact. Instead, a large set of arms and rounded fists slammed into the side of my skull and ribs, and knocked me right out of the air. I flew sideways, landing on the floor and sliding into the couch with a force great enough to tip it on its side.
Coughing up blood, I roared into the air and pushed up to my knees to find the person who’d just blindsided me. I had to shake my head a few times, waiting for my vision to clear. But even without sight, I knew who had entered my home. And god dammit if my bear didn’t finally start to listen.
“Stay down, Zane.” Brandt, my alpha and dare I even say my friend, wasn’t fucking around. He pushed the dominance into the air and it was so heavy it reminded me of Danika’s father. Which sent another round of rage deep into my core where my bear was just waiting for another excuse to show himself.
“What’s wrong with his arm?” Brandt asked.
“It’s his bear,” Julia whispered, eyes staring at mine in pity. “But only part of him.”
I screamed as loud as I could into the air, but Brandt’s power as alpha kept me on my knees. “He took her!”
Brandt looked at the others in the room, finally seeming to notice Seth for the first time. The wolf now stood in the half circle of people staring down at me with a blood-soaked towel pressed tightly against the left side of his face. I saw that and something inside of me twitched.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to him. He just gave me a small nod.
“Zane, you need to tell me what you’re talking about,” Brandt said calmly.
“I already fucking told everyone!” I shouted, trying to stand but still trapped under the power. “He came and took Danika!”
“Danika was still here?” Brandt asked Julia.
“She never left.”
“Why?” Brandt said calmly.
“Because they’re mated,” Derrick answered, looking at me with kindness and something else glowing in his eyes.
“Mated?” Brandt asked in surprise.
&nb
sp; “Can’t you smell it?” Derrick whispered.
Brandt slowly turned his head from Derrick and let his gaze pass over me before lifting his chin and sucking in a deep breath while looking down the hallway. When he returned his gaze, I caught the slight smile on his lips. “Well….no shit.”
Seth snorted a small laugh while Julia tucked her arm behind Derrick’s elbow. The four of them stared at me like I was some kind of love sick teenager.
“Well, are you going to help me fucking find her?” I growled.
Brandt, still exuding his alpha power, stepped closer to me and dropped to his knees. My instant reaction was to give him my neck, even though my bear was doing it out of necessity and not respect. Brandt set his hands on my shoulders, the weight of them pushing me further into the ground. “I will help you, but it’s more difficult than you know.”
“What?”
Brandt sighed. “There’s a lot of complicated shit going on right now, and I’m afraid Danika is smack in the middle of it all.”
“Brandt?” Derrick asked, and I knew he had been left out of the loop. Which meant that this couldn’t possibly be good news for our clan, or for the pack.
“Anton Drakov is a very powerful man—”
“Who stole my mate!” I shouted. Brandt squeezed my shoulders hard enough to make me flinch in pain. Fuck, he was strong.
“Who has entered our territory with permission—”
“What?” Seth yelled this time.
Brandt gave him a warning look before continuing. “Who has entered our territory with permission so that he could talk to his daughter.”
My arm started to shake again as my fingers elongated into claws. Brandt’s eyes widened a second before he snapped his head around and shoved his face into mine. “Stop the change.”
“I can’t,” I growled.
“Now!”
Julia and Derrick dropped to their knees under his command. Even Seth exposed his neck. But Brandt never spared a glance in their direction. Instead, he glared at me and dug his fingers into my bones.
“You need to get yourself under control right now,” he roared. “Or I’ll have to put you down.”
“Brandt, no!” Julia whimpered.
He shot her an angry look and then focused on me again. “Get your broken bear under control.”
Brandt and I had a long history of being on the opposite sides of each other. I’d sided with Julia’s dad when he challenged Brandt for alpha and I’d hurt many of those now in my pack. But while Brandt could have killed me several times over, instead he allowed me to be a part of the Callaghan clan and had given me the second chance at having a home. He had always been stronger than me, and right now, I realized just how much I needed that strength to help me through this.
“I know this isn’t your fault,” he whispered just to me. “And believe me when I tell you that I have many shifters working to find out more about these labs.”
“What about Danika?” I asked with a shaking voice.
Brandt sighed and loosened his grip slightly. “We will find her.”
“I can’t lose her,” I muttered. My arm relaxed and my bear started to fade away into the darkness again. I could feel my human fingers shrinking back to form and that uncontrollable anger started to subside.
Brandt gave me a crooked smile and then pulled me into a one-arm man hug. Patting the back of my head, he said, “I know. She’s your mate which makes her a part of our family. We will all make this right.”
Unable to stop myself, I sobbed against my alphas shoulder. It was a giant sign of weakness and I was sure Julia and Derrick were feeling the need to dominate me right now, but they stayed back and kept their mouths shut.
A phone rang and Seth hurried to pull it from his pocket. “It’s Scarlett,” he said and then rushed out the front door.
I looked up at Brandt, Julia, and Derrick. “So now what?” I asked calmly.
“I’m taking you to my house to get cleaned up and then we’ll go find Danika,” Brandt said. He helped me up off the floor and glanced down at my naked body. “Julia, can you grab him some clothes?”
She hurried down the hallway as Brandt passed me off to Derrick. “You got this?” he asked him.
After getting a confirmation nod from Derrick, Brandt stepped around the broken front door hanging by one hinge and disappeared outside. I panted at the effort needed to keep standing. But when Derrick let out a small chuckle, I had to pull away and give him a look.
“Are you laughing at me?”
He shook his head and let out a snort. “You mated with the dragon?”
I smiled, unable to stop my lips from pulling tightly across my teeth. “I guess I did.”
“Well…shit.”
“Yeah. Shit.”
We both laughed while Julia trotted over and handed me a set of sweats. “Come on giggles, we have some work to do.”
After I pulled on the clothes and they ushered me outside, I caught a whiff of Danika’s scent. My insides churned and I felt the bear rushing to the surface again. But Derrick clapped me on the back and helped me into the back seat of his truck. “Keep it together, man.”
Keep it together. I had to keep it together if I was going to be the strong man Danika needed me to be. As we pulled out of the trailer park and drove past all the nosy humans standing on their front porches and waiting for the gossip, I leaned my head back into the seat and closed my eyes.
Keep it together. For Danika.
I wondered when my father was going to visit me. I’d been surprised that he’d made it three weeks since the lab incident, but now I’d been in this tiny jail cell for at least twelve hours with nothing. Well, Sutton had stopped by briefly to give me some clothes, but she also hinted that she wasn’t supposed to be around me at all.
That didn’t bode well.
And where was Zane? Had my father’s mutant humans harmed him? He was still so weak and fragile, compared to my dragon, that all I could think about was him and how I would kill my father if something had happened to Zane. I think I loved that red-headed grizzly. A smile washed over my face as I relived our time together this morning. A smile that quickly dissipated as I thought about what my father had been intending for me. For decades, I managed to have my own life away from his controlling ways. I’d left Russia a hundred years ago, climbing out from under his prying eyes and starting a life of my own in Japan, Germany, and eventually the United States. I thought he’d given up on the bloodline and on me being the future mother of our kind. He’d searched relentlessly for years, trying to uncover another dragon. But Anton and Danika Drakov were the last two. My mother hadn’t survived childbirth, another reason why I thought my father was crazy for wanting to risk the same for me. Yet I guess I should have known that I wasn’t the most important treasure in his life.
I never had been.
But I was to Zane. He’d lusted after me for months, and I had secretly loved it. Despite not being able to disclose what I was, my dragon had found comfort in his closeness, his silliness, and the way he opened his heart to everyone. Zane always saw the best in people. He’d seen it in me, and now I couldn’t bear the thought of my father taking that away.
My dragon rumbled with anger, my chest burning with the need to release her. I did my best to quiet her down and was still working on it when the door leading to the small row of jail cells creaked open.
“Danika?” Major’s body came into view as he stepped in front of my cell. “How are you doing?”
I swallowed down a nasty response. This wasn’t his fault. “I’ve been better,” I groaned.
“I’m sorry you’re still in here. Your father—”
I raised my hand to cut him off. “You don’t need to explain. This is a thing we do.”
“What?”
“The power struggle. He likes to make people wait for him. Especially me.”
“Oh,” Major said quietly. Then he nodded to the camera in the corner and the door to my cell unclicked and s
lid open. “Well, he’s ready for all of us now.”
“All of us?” I asked as I stood, trying my best to smooth down the wrinkled blouse and dress pants Sutton had found somewhere. Probably the lost and found. I had no shoes but I walked as though dressed in my regular heels.
“Brandt, Scarlett, and Senator Torrance.” Major dropped his gaze with that last name.
“Major, why is a Senator here?” When he didn’t answer, I let a bit of the dragon fill the air. “Tell me.”
He leaned slightly to the side, acknowledging that I was in charge by exposing his neck as I approached. “It’s complicated. You’ll find out soon enough,” he added on quickly when I narrowed my eyes at him.
We walked in silence through the small, run down jail that had seen better days. The concrete walls with chipped tan paint reminded me that I wasn’t in my New York City penthouse anymore. And a small pang of sadness clutched at my chest as I thought about that. Nothing would be the same again. Not after what I did in Washington and especially not after I found out what my father had intended for me all along.
“Can you tone it down a bit, Danika?”
I looked over my shoulder to see Major rubbing the back of his neck. He was a dominant tiger shifter, but nothing could compete with my dragon. Even if I didn’t intend to use her. I let the smirk spread. If Major sensed my anger, I certainly hoped my father would too.
When we approached the small meeting room, I sensed the other shifters inside and committed the senator’s scent to memory. Seth was standing in the hallway staring down at his phone, leaning against the wall across from the viewing window. Major pushed passed me and gave me a quick nod to say he had a good reason for it.
“Everyone here?” Major asked Seth.
The wolf looked up from underneath his dark hair. His gaze met mine and then he immediately dropped it to his shoes. “I think so. Even Marcus came.”
“The coyote warlock?” I asked and Seth nodded. That man controlled a whole pack of skin-walkers and I’d yet to fully grasp the extent of his power. He may make an excellent ally, though.